Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  While the remains found just down the way from my apartment seemed to have been those of a 3-year-old, the girl had actually survived to about 7 years then was murdered by the mother, maybe in a rage, maybe not, and, having confessed, the woman died.

  The son that had been that mother’s second child, now in middle-age, was surprised to learn that he had had a sister and had shared that house in Chicago until he was 3 or 4 years old. Then he and his mother had packed and moved by night.

  The view from our second floor porch looks down that alley. The little girl’s former burial site is less than 100 feet from my back gate. I wasn’t living in Chicago when the crime took place. I was just a kid then, a reasonably well-adjusted, all-too-coddled kid growing up happy, and not, in Reading, Pennsylvania. I don’t know what I was doing when the 20-pound 7-year-old became a corpse. But in my trailing years I shared a back alley with the little girl and that view from my window, down the way, and the changing shape of the neighborhood has always made me feel connected. We were neighbors, I guess. I grew up in a small town and people close to each other are neighbors, damn it.

  The story was written more than a dozen years ago. I put it aside and read it publicly a few times–in Chicago, at a World Horror Convention in Denver. I tried to sell it once. It didn’t sell. I understand. It’s got problems. It’s too long, it rambles. But it is one of those things I won’t fuss with. Finally, an editor who had heard me read it asked me for it and published it in early 2008 in an anthology of tales by Midwestern writers of the dark called “Hell in the Heartland.”

  The Little Girl is complete; her story is told. The Chicago Police spoke for her; now, I let her speak for herself. It’s not a story for enjoyment, but I hope it touches you as her story still touches me.

  Well, maybe it’ll get you up and moving around the room, that at least.

  “NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER”: A VERY BAD DAY

  Very little needs to be said. I was asked to contribute to a pet-themed anthology. I had two cats, Mozart, a tabby-Siamese blend, deep blue eyes and haughty as hell and Wolfgang, a gray, sweet-tempered former boy who was a surprisingly swift mouser.

  There once was a bookstore nearby, something like the one in the story. It had everything and they charged too much. Then it closed and I missed it.

  When I considered how much mystery-life was to be found in a cat and how mathematically magical was the amount of information to be found in so vast a place as the now-gone bookstore, I started to write. I had also just been dumped and wanted to memorialize that fact. Leslie is my go-to character for shifting things out of my own life and dumping them into someone utterly unlike me.

  The end of the world? Catholic guilt.

  CORRIDORS OF NIGHT: RAT TIME IN THE HALL OF PAIN

  There was such a film. I saw it in elementary school. The twitching images never left me.

  Rat Time… is one of my “vile tales”—the vilest of which are not included in this collection. This one wriggled into my head during a road trip to a World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. Marty Mundt and I drove, Chicago to Providence, 983 miles, with pauses for input and output only. Twelve hours. Most of the night driving was mine. When the world is a rushing tunnel of strobing median perforations, when your companion is a sleeping lump, when the world’s only voice is an F.M. stranger who fades in, then crackles away, when you push the speed so your nerves keep you quivering awake, then oddities begin to peek in at the periphery. Somewhere in Ohio I realized we’d passed signs for a strangely large number of “Halls of Fame.” Travelers of I-90 not in a highway fugue-state might pause to visit the College Football, Basketball, Rock and Roll, Baseball, Professional Wrestling, and Volleyball Halls of Fame. There are others I no longer remember, all along a thousand linear American miles.

  Back in Chicago, I began a generic tale about a guy riding the I-90 corridor who stops by these places and does dreadful things. At some point the fame/pain pseudo-rhyme suggested itself and there it was. Who better to be memorialized in a so-named hall at the literal end of his road than a serial killer?

  I apologize to a junior high buddy, now, alas, no longer with us. His name was Winkler and he was a quirky old pal. Like many of us in the middle-years of youth, he reinvented himself with wonderful regularity.

  I wanted my killer guy to carry a squeaky, non-threatening name and “Winkler” it was. I also wanted him to wake in each cycle of murderous urging with adjusted versions of old memories. And there he was, Alex Winkler, monster.

  Where to leave him at the end? Where to memorialize, to punish him? In himself, of course. In himself.

  I CAN BE BRIEF: THEN, JUST A DREAM

  I once read this story aloud in a heartbeat under five minutes. A joke among my friends is that my titles are longer than some people’s stories: God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him. ‘What Do You Know of the Land of Death?’ Clown Said One Night to the Haunted Boy. She Was Washing Her Frock When Winston Churchill Came Galloping Out of the Mist. By publication time, that last one became Children, Invisible, Watching from the Great Darkness, but you get the idea.

  Not surprisingly, I’m not much for “flash” fiction, tales developed and ended in 500-700 words. I certainly never intended to enter the flash fiction competition at the 2007 World Horror Convention in Toronto. I was going to hear some friends read. That was it.

  While slicking my hair in the room before the event, though, I remembered a thing written a year or so before, one of those notions that nudge you when you’re doing something else. I dug through the computer and there it was: Then, Just Dreaming. Fifteen hundred words. I skimmed it. The skim took more than five minutes. The contest limits readers to five minutes and “not a heartbeat longer.”

  At first look, the thing felt like one of those shaggy dog tales everyone writes in junior high, ending with, “and then I woke and found it was all just a dream.”

  Come on, I said to myself, even goofing around you wouldn’t have written that. I re-read and realized the thing needed a second (maybe third) reading to make its way inside the reader. It’s a true nightmare, one folded on itself.

  I’ll let you decide what it is. What I thought at the time was, Damn, flash fiction should not require a study guide.

  I trimmed it. Trimmed some more. Not hard. Even at 1,200 words there was flab. Screw it. I printed it, went down to the lobby, crossed out a few more lines then let it go. You can’t do flash fiction, Larry. Hell no. Peter Crowther was one of the judges along with Ed Bryant and Nancy Kilpatrick. Christ no. You’re not going to get up drunk and…

  Did I mention? This was one of my beer and vodka nights. They happen at conventions.

  I stuck the “Dream” in my pocket and went into the ballroom to hear my chums. Chums saw me coming. Chums chuckled.

  “Santoro. Flash Fiction. Mutually exclusive concepts,” someone said.

  “No, no. Just here to watch.”

  Perverse as I am, though, I sign up. Being with the beer and vodka helped. I sit. Some read. My name is called. I go to the lectern. The assembly calls out, “On your mark! Get set!! READ LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER!!!” Tradition.

  It is not that I motormouth the tale, I keep it brisk. I begin quickly because near the end I know there’s a moment when I need a long beat of dead air to give what follows some weight. I establish a pace quick enough to make even a short pause seem like a deathwatch. Later beats lend themselves to breathless rushing and there, indeed, I read like a motherfucker.

  I speak the tale’s final word, “Goddamn…” as the timekeeper puts his hand on my shoulder. I am in, out and under five by less than a second.

  Others read. The judges retire. We drink and cuss. They return.

  I do not take third place, which I halfway hoped for. There had been some really good writer/readers. I do not take second. I’m done, I think. I do take first. The world is turvy, topsy-wise. We’ve fallen into another version of the Big All.

  The prize? Bragging rights, basicall
y. But I am pleased and honored so here I am bragging. I read like a motherfucker.

  Since then, the story has been podcast in Great Britain by the StarShipSofa. It won the StarShip’s “Best Short Fiction” award for 2009 and was published in StarShipSofa Stories, Volume 2, in 2010. Now it’s here. I hope you enjoyed it.

  JERSEY, 1950-SOMETHING: SO MANY TINY MOUTHS

  My first-hand knowledge about the Jersey Pine Barrens is 40 years out of date. Let me go back even further, to Pennsylvania, 1950-something. Summers, Dad, Mom, cousins and I would hop into the old man’s green-over-cream ’53 Bel Air hardtop and point the grille toward pre-Trump Atlantic City. We’d make the Delaware crossing into Jersey on the Chester-Bridgeport Ferry and two hours later a half-dozen layers of winter skin would have blistered to a sweaty peel and Steel Pier salt-water taffy would have yanked that year’s fillings out of our heads.

  Before we became beach-blanket brisket though, we had to cross Jersey. I spent those 60-plus non-air conditioned miles in the Chevy’s back seat meditating on undertow or skewering a bare foot on the tail of summer’s first horseshoe crab. Being thus occupied it wasn’t until years later I noticed that most of trans-Jersey was trees.

  Later still, I learned those 60-some-odd miles, the whole of central Jersey in fact, was a geopolitical entity called the Pine Barrens. As explained by my elder and savvier cousin Fred, the Barrens was dark and scary woods inhabited by inbred six-fingered folk who lived in caves, prayed to odd and grubby gods, made their own gas from pig shit, and ate lost travelers. They called themselves “Pineys.”

  Much later, I made a now-long-gone documentary film about the region called ...Where the Sun Never Shines. In making it, I found Pineys, sadly, to be garden-variety Americans. Your personal demons can inform whatever image that concept conjures. The Pineys I met were independent-minded and didn’t care to be fussed-over about where they live or what they do. They do a lot for themselves, things most of us gave up doing a generation or more ago (That, about pig shit and gas? It’s true). Their world is deep forest and truck-wide sand trails; it is small streams and cedar swamps, abandoned bogs and the smell of decay and sphagnum moss. The tales they tell outsiders are curious and spooky. Of course.

  Navigating the Barrens was tricky. Now we’d use our iPhones. Then we felt our way among the trees by dashboard compass, odometer and Geodetic Survey maps. Place names still dot those maps: Ong’s Hat, Batsto, Hog Wallow. All that lived in those invisible towns was stillness, a sense of the once-was and never-will-be hung in those clearings and shallow hollows that once were lived-in places. An outsider who arrived at one of those named abandonments, who stood at a five-trail wideness in the forest and turned his eyes four-ways into that old, old darkness around, most likely felt the lurk of the strange behind and ahead. I’m sure of it.

  Despite squatting at the concrete heart of the Megalopolis, there are economic, political, and social reasons why the Barrens remains green, relatively human-free, and unimproved. These reasons are not part of this tale’s fetchings.

  Point is, I liked the area. I admired the people and, despite the arrogance of youth, I learned a little about them.

  Another thing I learned: it’s a hard place to get right. My film never caught it. Later, I set a story, Veterans, in the Barrens. Later still, having sold two screenplays, I adapted Veterans for film. Veterans, the Movie, remains unproduced. Worse, in Dreamland terms, it remains unsold.

  One supremely good writer I know set a much admired story in the Pines. He missed it. One of the best episodes of The Sopranos was set there. The show’s city-bred wiseguys were money-on as strangers in a strange land, but that episode, The Barrens, shot in a generic woodland with no spirit of the Pines, lost the chill of the place.

  When I was asked to submit to an anthology of tales on a theme of fang and talon, the Pines entered my head. I guess I wanted another shot at getting it right.

  Okay, thought I, the salient features of the Barrens are trees and sand. Trees with claws? A cliché. Sand with teeth? Well…

  The editors passed on So Many Tiny Mouths. They were right to do so. That version focused on the tourists from Philly. I guess I was still sitting in the back seat of Dad’s Chevy. I read the story in a few public venues. A friend asked to buy more or less this version for an online prozine he was publishing, so there it was. Most recently, Great Britain’s StarShipSofa.com podcast a recording I made of the story.

  So here it is, re-thought, in ink, on public paper for the first time. I hope I got the Pines right. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. As I said, it was 40 years ago and the Barrens is an elusive place.

  By the way, Earl Sooey, the coot through whose eye we watch the world end: He’s fiction, coincidence. Really.

  LIFE ON THE RIVER: JEREMY TAKES HIS TEXT FROM THE LIVES OF THE SPIDERS

  My writer’s group, Chicago’s Twilight Tales, used to throw an annual Mardi Gras party at the Red Lion Pub. One year the chairman of the group asked some of the regulars to read something set in New Orleans. Having been asked, I wrote this tale.

  Jeremy suggested himself to me because vampires and “walk-ins” seem to be a part of the atmosphere of New Orleans. Understand, I’ve never been there. Always wanted to go but the several times I’ve planned trips, the plans became undone, the most recent undoing courtesy of Hurricane Katrina.

  I do know something about river travel, though.

  One dark and drunken night after my return from the Air Force, a buddy and I decided that we had never had an adventure. Exciting things, yes, had happened to us, but nothing ever of our own volition. We decided it would be just swell to go down the Mississippi River on a raft. Okay, a small boat, no cabin, nothing fancy. We’d start at the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh where the Ohio begins. We’d ride the Ohio for its full 981 miles, pick up the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, then slide down to the Big Easy. Simple.

  We bought a 14-foot sky blue jon boat, a shallow flat bottomed thing with blunt prow and stern. When fully loaded with outboard motor, fuel, camping supplies, clothing, food, and us, about three inches of freeboard remained.

  Research begun and concluded the same drunken night the urge took us told us that the Ohio trucked along at a comfortable several miles an hour. We had visions. Huck and Jim would drift through sunny days and starry nights of the soul. Gentle water would lap our gunnels as froggies courted along the shore. Friendly tow-barges would wave to us as they slipped by. Our little putt-putt motor would be used only when a quick hurry was required to take us here or there along the way.

  Currents are funny. Their substance is deep. After our put-in below the triangle, we found our expected downstream flow toward the Gulf of Mexico was more of a generalized upstream drift toward Pittsburgh. Even near-swamped, our little flat-bottomed boat reached barely 11 inches below the surface. The consequence was, we skimmed the river, skewing, sliding here and there more at the whim of breeze than current. Heavy rowing or the engine was necessary simply to keep us heading west and south.

  The first tow-boat scared the bejeezus out of us. Out of morning mist there came a quarter mile of diesel-pushed steel, bellowing, two barges wide. The blind monster threw an eight foot high bow wave that spread across the river like a green rolling mountain. Imagine the view from a blue aluminum hole a bare three inches above the surface.

  Less than five miles from our put-in we went to shore, set up camp, reappraised this volitional adventure.

  To say “shore” is to idealize the land along the Ohio west of Pittsburgh. Conjure a slurry of mud and cinders capped with a six-inch mat of oil and other industrial effluvia spread along a sumac-crowded railroad right-of-way. We camped, rethought, regrouped, slept, and to our credit (or disgrace) continued the adventure the next morning. It was a cold night. I didn’t mention: this was October, heading into November. We did not dare build a fire the night before for fear of igniting the river or the land or both.

  We never got to New Orleans, nor to the Mississippi. We did mak
e Kentucky. We had many adventures and were jailed only once and that in Bellaire, Ohio for attempting to enter a VFW Post while wet. That’s a long story. We did not join a drinking companion we met in West Virginia as he headed out to find his girl, who had started dating a biker gang while he was in the Nam. He had a loaded .45 in his belt and dynamite in his truck and invited us along to watch. That also is a long story, which I will someday tell.

  The spiders are real. They happened damn-near as written.

  A TALE FROM THE RED LION: CORDWELL’S BOOK

  There is so much true and accurate in this story that I almost need not tell you any more. John Cordwell is gone now but he lived and his story as written here is mostly as it was lived. He was among those who made a habit of escaping from the Germans during that Second unpleasantness with the Hun. John was a character in the film The Great Escape. There are documentary films about him and the other POWs who made that audacious escape. Escapes, actually. The reality is more remarkable and more improbable than that shown in the theatrical film.

  “Cordwell’s Book” came about because a bunch of us were drinking in the upstairs room of the Red Lion Pub in Chicago one night. Eventually the talk came around to the idea of doing an anthology of stories centered on the Lion and written by writers who hung out there. “Like us,” someone said. “Tales from the Red Lion,” someone suggested, “like Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon but different, see?”

  Seemed like a good idea.

  As mentioned, I’d fallen into the place during my first week in Chicago. I was a theater guy from the east and the Lion was a place where theater folk hung. John Cordwell was a bigger-than-us-all presence in the bar and I was shy around him. I liked him and the place and was learning to like that time of my life.